LEGO is considering abandoning physical instructions

[danth]

https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-may-abandon-physical-instructions/

Supposedly there is an official Lego survey on this but I can't find it.

https://brickset.com/article/113691/lego-may-be-considering-phasing-out-paper-instructions

Quote

Update 19th Sept 14:15: It looks as if the survey has been removed, perhaps as a result of the storm of protest it has caused here and on other blogs, or perhaps because it was very poorly designed and worded.

 

[Slegengr]

I hope they don't go only digital.  The function/purpose of digital instructions is evident to me and I do use them, but nothing beats building with physical booklets with my nephews, in my opinion.
Maybe I am just old-school and nostalgic to my childhood experience in the 90's, but I love to collect the instruction booklets with the sets of my childhood and still prefer printed instructions to digital whenever possible.

Along with this, I still value physical informational books over only digital media.  In this modern day, I like to keep my real-world experiences rather than replace them all with digital experiences, but I may be in the minority.

[neithan]

More screentime for kids, yeah!

 

I really don`t like that idea, not in the slightest.

Have used digital instructions only two times and only because the two sets from bluebrixx (Mould king) had no physical instructions. When I´m building with bricks, I don`t want to look at a screen.

[JesseNight]

Same, already spending more than enough time behind a screen each day. During LEGO moments I prefer to stay away from them.
I even went as far as making paper notes with my physical instructions for corrections to mistakes that were updated in the digital version, or even small mods.

[Toastie]

Well ...

... when TLG "needs" to continue printing instructions of encyclopedia size because they don't want anyone left behind, then - yeah, they better go digital. The one piece per step approach is a bit "paper consuming". 

And as they are targeting the newbies so much (I know, yeah, they have to) then, yes, go digital. I really don't like digital instructions at all, but well, it is what they decided on, when cranking out the black boxes.

All the best,
Thorsten

 

[Mikdun]

To reduce amount of paper they will better use more parts per step. This will also make brain work harder.

[idlemarvel]

31 minutes ago, Mikdun said:

To reduce amount of paper they will better use more parts per step. This will also make brain work harder.

Agreed. There's a line between helping newbies and treating people like idiots. Instructions from vintage sets really made you think and check before going on to the next step. Paradoxically I find I am more likely to miss a piece when the picture of one step looks almost identical to the next, and my grandchildren find the huge multi-volume tomes published with even modest sets off-putting.

[Karalora]

I'm against it. When you buy a LEGO set, everything you need to put it together should be inside the box. Lest we forget, these are primarily toys for children, who aren't all going to be adroit enough with an electronic device to follow instructions that way.

[Murdoch17]

Per Brickset, LEGO has released a statement on the survey and paper instructions:

Quote

We would like to reassure fans that we have no plans to stop using physical building instructions in our products.

We conducted this survey to understand more about our adult fans’ preferences regarding our products and building experience, something we do regularly across a range of topics.

We would like to thank our LEGO Insiders members who took the time to respond to the survey - your feedback is important to us and helps us make our LEGO experiences even better.

 

[SpacePolice89]

 

13 minutes ago, Murdoch17 said:

Per Brickset, LEGO has released a statement on the survey and paper instructions:

 

I guess they are trying to save face by releasing such a statement. I believe 99% of respondents were negative towards forced digital instruction and now they are doing damage control. At least they respect their customers by withdrawing these horrible plans.

Edited September 20, 2024 by SpacePolice89

[Yperio_Bricks]

I guess they wanted to reduce production costs by "economizing the building process" using digital instructions only (without passing the saved costs on to the customer by reducing set price of course ) and faced a hugh backlash from the AFOL community. But i am sure the topic is not dead and they will bring it on again some time in the future.

[Lyichir]

To be honest when I looked at the survey it seemed to be only exploring it as an optional thing—one of the questions included an option about whether buyers would consider buying sets without physical instructions for a slight discount or VIP points bonus, which to be honest struck me as something that could be useful if you don't keep your instructions or were only buying a set for the parts in the first place.

Of course the cynics are going to assume that their overreaction was correct and that Lego is saving face, despite there being zero indication from the survey that any sort of universal abandonment of instructions was even on the table. Realistically, there was no universe in which Lego would actually be considering removing physical instructions altogether, not when there's no way to actually verify that the bulk of their consumer base would even have access to digital instructions.

[danth]

Lego would absolutely get rid of paper instructions the instant they thought they could without hurting sales, but that probably won't happen for a long time. They'll still release trial sets without instructions, like some Mario sets and the "Mission" City sets, to keep testing the waters, and will probably never stop trying. But I think we're safe for now.

8 hours ago, Lyichir said:

To be honest when I looked at the survey

How did you even see it? It was taken down super fast.

8 hours ago, Lyichir said:

one of the questions included an option about whether buyers would consider buying sets without physical instructions for a slight discount or VIP points bonus

I don't see how that would work. Wouldn't that require two different releases of each kind of set, one with and one without instructions? Logistical and cost nightmare. That leads me to believe the questions were meant to gauge how willing people were to give up paper instructions, and not seriously exploring the option as a real thing.

17 hours ago, Mikdun said:

To reduce amount of paper they will better use more parts per step. This will also make brain work harder. 

16 hours ago, idlemarvel said:

Agreed. There's a line between helping newbies and treating people like idiots.

You can't deny there is waste that can be trimmed without making anything harder. For instance, there are plenty of steps that have 3 pieces, thus proving 3-piece steps aren't too difficult, or Lego wouldn't include those steps. So we know we can combine steps with only one piece or two pieces. There might be exceptions for tricky steps but the vast majority of single-piece steps can be combined.

We also know that you can have two steps on a single page. So why do so many pages have only a single step? It's just a waste of paper.

If you combine single-piece steps and single-step pages, that cuts many instruction book page counts by half.

8 hours ago, Lyichir said:

Of course the cynics are going to assume that their overreaction was correct and that Lego is saving face

Cynics or realists? 🙂

"Just kidding...unless?" Corporations literally do this all the time, it's standard procedure. Send up a trial balloon, then when you get the immediate backlash, pretend you never meant it. If it was anything less, they wouldn't have removed the survey so quickly.

Edited September 20, 2024 by danth

[MAB]

14 hours ago, Lyichir said:

To be honest when I looked at the survey it seemed to be only exploring it as an optional thing—one of the questions included an option about whether buyers would consider buying sets without physical instructions for a slight discount or VIP points bonus, which to be honest struck me as something that could be useful if you don't keep your instructions or were only buying a set for the parts in the first place.

Of course the cynics are going to assume that their overreaction was correct and that Lego is saving face, despite there being zero indication from the survey that any sort of universal abandonment of instructions was even on the table. Realistically, there was no universe in which Lego would actually be considering removing physical instructions altogether, not when there's no way to actually verify that the bulk of their consumer base would even have access to digital instructions.

I didn't get that view at all. It would be unworkable too, having to have two versions of sets, with and without instructions.  It would probably also lead to complaints that the set they bought is missing instructions when they didn't realise.

The alternative would be to have certain ranges or sets not have physical instructions at all but then consumers wouldn't know there is a discount for LEGO not producing instructions. And that does not really give a choice for consumers.

Edited September 21, 2024 by MAB

[Mylenium]

15 hours ago, danth said:

I don't see how that would work. Wouldn't that require two different releases of each kind of set, one with and one without instructions? Logistical and cost nightmare. That leads me to believe the questions were meant to gauge how willing people were to give up paper instructions, and not seriously exploring the option as a real thing.

I don't think they'd ship two versions of a set. They'd all be without instructions and if you want it, they'd hand it over. The boxes could even have prepared compartments for that accessible without actually opening the main package. The rest we can agree on. There would be zero cost savings since they'd still ship stacks of instructions and doing so separately increases the risk of something going wrong. The alternative to that would be on-demand printing on location, but those machines also cost money and need to be maintained, not saving any cost at all. Overall the idea of getting rid of printed instructions is just weird and doesn't make too much sense no matter how you spin it.

Mylenium

[Lion King]

To be honest, I’m netural. I love his Al instruction inside the box. But….i’m visually impaired and i heavily depend on digital instructions.  It’s. Easy to zoom in nd out and see what pieces I need. 

[danth]

Man, I bought a couple Mario sets and forgot they don't have paper instructions. Even worse, they don't have any sort of PDF instruction. You HAVE to use some stupid app to get the instructions. I hate it. 

The images for the August wave of SW sets show people using the instruction app...I hope this doesn't mean those sets won't have physical instructions. 

[icm]

If it's any consolation, the later waves of Super Mario sets at least have PDF instructions. Still sucks that there aren't even PDF instructions for the early waves. Do the new ones still not have paper instructions in the box? That's awful.

Edit - Looking at speed builds on YouTube, it looks like newer sets do have paper instructions. Which Super Mario sets did you buy, and which year did they come out?

Edited July 7 by icm

[Murdoch17]

11 minutes ago, icm said:

If it's any consolation, the later waves of Super Mario sets at least have PDF instructions. Still sucks that there aren't even PDF instructions for the early waves. Do the new ones still not have paper instructions in the box? That's awful.

Edit - Looking at speed builds on YouTube, it looks like newer sets do have paper instructions. Which Super Mario sets did you buy, and which year did they come out?

I'm also curious as to this. How old were they and what sets did you buy @danth?

Edited July 7 by Murdoch17

[danth]

14 minutes ago, icm said:

If it's any consolation, the later waves of Super Mario sets at least have PDF instructions. Still sucks that there aren't even PDF instructions for the early waves. Do the new ones still not have paper instructions in the box? That's awful.

Edit - Looking at speed builds on YouTube, it looks like newer sets do have paper instructions. Which Super Mario sets did you buy, and which year did they come out?

I'm glad you asked. I'm talking about 71427 and 71391. I bought both new from Bricklink about a month ago.

I started building 71427, which had no instructions in the box. I looked on Lego's website, and its instruction download is just a small PDF that says to get the app. I haven't opened 71391, but it has the same kind of download on the Lego website so I assumed it also has no physical instructions. I searched for instructions in PDF form but all the sites I tried have the same small PDF that say to get the app.

But I just looked on Brickset to find out what year these were, and noticed they have a much bigger PDF for download that happens to be the actual instructions in PDF form. Yay! Why did Google not find those? I prefer physical instructions, but those PDFs are a godsend compared to having to use that darn app, or the youtube version that you have to constantly pause.

[icm]

2 minutes ago, danth said:

I started building 71427, which had no instructions in the box. I looked on Lego's website, and its instruction download is just a small PDF that says to get the app. I haven't opened 71391, but it has the same kind of download on the Lego website so I assumed it also has no physical instructions. I searched for instructions in PDF form but all the sites I tried have the same small PDF that say to get the app.

But I just looked on Brickset to find out what year these were, and noticed they have a much bigger PDF for download that happens to be the actual instructions in PDF form. Yay! Why did Google not find those? I prefer physical instructions, but those PDFs are a godsend compared to having to use that darn app, or the youtube version that you have to constantly pause.

Wow. I had no idea you couldn't even download the instructions from the Lego web site. I just went to Lego.com to search for the instructions for those two sets, and all I found was that small PDF that says to get the app. Good thing Brickset knows where to get the real instructions from. It's just bananas that Lego doesn't even have PDF instructions for Super Mario sets in an easily accessible place on their website. Absolutely bananas.

[Vindicare]

On 7/7/2025 at 3:17 PM, danth said:

Man, I bought a couple Mario sets and forgot they don't have paper instructions. Even worse, they don't have any sort of PDF instruction. You HAVE to use some stupid app to get the instructions. I hate it. 

The images for the August wave of SW sets show people using the instruction app...I hope this doesn't mean those sets won't have physical instructions. 

I hope this is just them trying to appeal to device addicted folks. This set is one I was most looking forward to. I don’t buy Bricklink Designer sets solely because they’re digital. I only built one set using didgital, and that was the fully Venomized Groot. That was more than enough for me, I hated it. 

[TeriXeri]

I really disliked when in 2021,  City had those 3 sets (a police boat, a space ship and a safari rescue truck) with no instructions, not even PDF.

Now, those sets were small enough for it to not be a giant disaster, and half the sets were extra pieces to customize anyway, but you needed an app followed "story" to build tthe base model, and even when it was part of the default instructions app, it was silly there was no PDF instruction too.

Sets themselves were really good playsets/parts packs however, no fault there really (beside the US price but 2021 had a lot of that with City sets being $10-20 higher)
 

Meanwhile some recent City sets, especially 4+ and 5+, literally use like 1 LEGO piece per 2 pages of instructions.... (the instruction variants with those blue hands)

 

Sometimes a Creator set has a 4th or 5th model being digital, or Dreamzzz had 2 2025 sets with 20 models (10 digital only)  which I can understand, but removing all instructions would be terrible.

Edited Saturday at 07:15 PM by TeriXeri

[Mylenium]

12 hours ago, TeriXeri said:

I really disliked when in 2021,  City had those 3 sets (a police boat, a space ship and a safari rescue truck) with no instructions, not even PDF.

Yeah, those "Missions" sets were pretty terrible in that regard. Worse yet, you couldn't even skip steps in the app and had to endure the text slowly popping on and animations to play out.

Mylenium

[danth]

On 7/12/2025 at 12:06 PM, TeriXeri said:

Sets themselves were really good playsets/parts packs however, no fault there really (beside the US price but 2021 had a lot of that with City sets being $10-20 higher)

Agreed, I liked everything but the price and lack of instructions. At least there were a ton of prints. 

19 hours ago, Mylenium said:

Yeah, those "Missions" sets were pretty terrible in that regard. Worse yet, you couldn't even skip steps in the app and had to endure the text slowly popping on and animations to play out.

Ugh, that sucks! There should always be a digital PDF at the very least.